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I had no idea of the depth of feeling about one line on an optional page:

At the moment the 'score' means 'Alerts:' but subtracted from 10. It could just as easily say 'Alerts: 8' meaning I had 8 distant mutters (which I never heard actually) "thought I heard something..." As said earlier I think it's too severe at the moment as many ghosters don't even count these lowest level alerts (which is the reason why I'm promoting its review at some future release and gathering opinions.) Or if it were subtracted from 100 then I would have got 92%.

So, *if* it remains purely an alert stat (since kills, KOs etc. are listed separately) then the subheader could be renamed 'Alerts:' and as demagogue suggested a zero would indicate no alerts and the player can take that as a raw stat or take it as a personal aim. I don't know if it is possible to split the alert stats into levels (nor do I know off-hand how many levels of alert there actually are in Dark Mod):

An Alerts stat would make sense if it was broken down into categories - there are different degrees of ghosting success, e.g. regular ghost allows first level alerts ("thought I heard something"), while stricter modes do not. Also, an objective measure would be better than one that's based on some arbitrary form of weighting. Just my opinion, of course, and certainly not game-breaking if it is done otherwise. After all, TDP/TMA had no score like this.

I think there are many ways to calculate the "thiefness" of the player - thus all these additional evaluators should probably be optional and plugin based.
I could imagine ghosting evaluator for example which would compare the state of the doors to the one at the start of the mission, count the number of alerts, etc. One could have an evaluator for all additional rule sets, in fact.

I think there are many ways to calculate the "thiefness" of the player

Indeed there are. There are AI alerts, there are moveables out of place, doors opened, loot collected, arrows used, AI harmed, sounds emitted, torches doused. You can even name this differently and compile "Stealthiness", "Ghostness", "Thiefness", "Whateverness".

As this (theoretical) discussion showed, everybody has a different opinion of what "stealthy" is, as everybody has a different preferred playstyle. Obviously something people can write lengthy posts about because it's absolutely important and will seriously affect gameplay.

For this first draft, we chose AI Alerts and summed them up in a weighted manner (serious alerts count more negatively than mutters).

As somebody else mentioned, certain mission objectives will cause such "scores" or "stats" (which are equivalent in the end) to drop even for ghosters, so we already thought about opening this to mappers, so that they can define: "In this mission, don't count the death of AI "Joe" towards the ghost score, as it's a mandatory objective to kill him.").

Needs more thought and this will make it into some future update, I reckon.

So, the stealth score at the moment is calculated only from the number of "busts"? That's kinda okay (I thought it took everything, like KOs, etc, into account, like in the later Splinter Cell games), but it would still be better just to give a number of alerts IMO, like Fidcal said.

So, *if* it remains purely an alert stat (since kills, KOs etc. are listed separately) then the subheader could be renamed 'Alerts:' and as demagogue suggested a zero would indicate no alerts and the player can take that as a raw stat or take it as a personal aim. I don't know if it is possible to split the alert stats into levels (nor do I know off-hand how many levels of alert there actually are in Dark Mod):

Alerts: High: 0 Medium: 0 Low: 8

EDIT:

Originally Posted by Brethren

Wow, I guess there's not a lot going on in ThiefGen. I've never seen something so meaningless blown so far out of proportion.

It's a compliment - Dark Mod looks so good in every aspect that people have to find some bullshit like this to argue about.

There are places in the OMs where player action can ramp up the alertness of an AI or two in another area without the player knowing it's occurred until eventually reaching it, finding AIs off their patrols or aware of the player from the slightest noise.

And the arguing has nothing to do with The Dark Mod or ThiefGen. It's about clashing philosophies regarding people and society--including those who seek irrational excuses to pounce on their "nemesis."

I'd like to distinguish between the information displayed in a statistic, and the way in which that statistic is displayed to the user. It doesn't have to bounce up and down in the middle of the monitor screen while the sound of cheering fills the room. Are you really going to find some statistic discretely displayed on some menu screen an immersion killer?

Sorry mate, I didn't mean to single you out as if you were calling for that level of 'dumbed down' exploration feedback, and I don't mean to imply that this is what the Dark Mod will be doing, I was just thinking out loud regarding games in general.

The basic point (which I didn't clearly illustrate) is that games which tell you that there's nothing left to explore remove the mystery that there could be more to the game world than you actually get to experience (which again I concede could work for some games). Just to be clear, I don't have any concerns about the stats display for the Dark Mod, which is looking pretty sweet I have to say .

As a ghoster - I think a breakdown of low/medium/serious alerts would be helpful. Are these statistics only available on mission end or can they be accessed at any point during the mission? The latter would be preferable.

As a ghoster - I think a breakdown of low/medium/serious alerts would be helpful. Are these statistics only available on mission end or can they be accessed at any point during the mission? The latter would be preferable.

There's some jen-yoo-wine lunacy going on over the last couple of pages, I'm so glad you're all just words on the internet and not real people otherwsie I'd be fucking scared.

Originally Posted by Fidcal

Alerts: High: 0 Medium: 0 Low: 8

That ^ and demagogue's refreshingly sane suggestions, please. Number of alerts of whatever different states there are, with zero being "perfect" and no upper limit. Simple is best. If you want stats for moved items and such, better to keep them separate than jumble several things into some hidden formula, let players assess/ignore what they want. I'm not a compulsive ghoster but I try it every now and then; furthermore, I like to set goals for myself to suit the mission and my mood (eg, allowing KOs, perhaps a limited number, but no alerts). Even if you never play that way, you only need to read a single ghost report to see why a large number of players will really, really welcome these stats. That IMO is reason enough to include them.

Now I'm going to contradict myself and complicate things slightly: you might want to offer some way of separating out alerts of human AI and other AI (beasts, undead, etc). Even when I'm playing quite strictly, I tend not to give a shit if a spider sees me (he's hardly gonna give my description to the cops, is he?). On the stats page, is it possible to make a row of stats change by clicking on it? Then you could cycle through sets of alert stats by clicking on that line: Total, human, beast, undead, machine, etc.